Tips for Taking the Sting out of Tax Season

We Heart Taxes. Hooray, it’s that time of year again! No, we don’t mean
Valentine’s Day, though we could sure use a hug. It’s tax season, and that
means lots of fun-filled nights hunting for documents, scrutinizing receipts,
and generally wishing someone would just put us out of our misery. In an effort
to ease the pain, the National Association for the Self-Employed (NASE)
recently offered a bunch of tax tips for small businesses. Among them:

File
electronically because you’ll get your refund much sooner than people who submit
a paper return.

Report
all types of income, including investment income (good for you if you’ve
got any!).

Be
careful with your deductions. Partying with clients is kosher. Partying
with your shiftless friends at the local dive bar, not so much.

Million Dollar Baby. There are more than 10 million
women-owned businesses in the US,
but most make less than $50,000 a year. Nell Merlino, the driving force behind
the Take Our Daughters to Work Day, is hoping to change that. She recently
launched an online contest called Make Mine a Million $ Business Race that
inspires female entrepreneur to, you guessed it, make a million. The so-called
race, say organizers, works like a marathon, only you don’t have to do any
running. Oh yeah, there’s a cool prize: The winner gets $100,000 and a year’s
worth of marketing, advertising and press opportunities.

Crazy like a fox, or just plain crazy? We thought blogs we’re
killing newspapers, not creating them. Obviously, Joshua Karp never got the
memo. This Chicago
entrepreneur has launched a new newspaper that assembles blog posts and photos
from over 300 online sources and puts them on paper. The resulting publication
is called, aptly enough, The Printed Blog. The first issues hit the streets
last week in Chicago and San Francisco. It costs $15-$20 to advertise
in the paper, a rate that Karp says should encourage local businesses to place
an ad. “Media companies can’t compete with those rates,” Karp told one
interviewer. “There’s such turmoil in the newspaper industry, that it’s a
time for somebody who has the foolishness or the wherewithal to do something
else.”Who knows, there might be method
to his madness.

NFL on Business. Now that the Super Bowl is over, what are
NFL players suppose to do? Dispense business advice, that’s what. Former greats
gathered in Florida
as part of the National Football League’s Emerging Business Program to impart
wisdom on the pitfalls and challenges of starting a business and making it
grow. What would they know about that? Quite a bit, actually. The keynote
speaker was Willie Lanier, hall of fame former linebacker for the Kansas City
Chiefs who’s currently CEO of syncreon-US, a $100 million company that
specializes in material handling.